The Daily Clog

So how are things here in Bogotá?

The rain is washing away roads and flooding more than usual. No doubt that is due to global warming. In an effort to control it, can all of you stop flushing toilet paper down the toilet and instead please just throw it in the waste paper basket?

Do you know that Colombians actually think that toilet paper thrown in the toilet will clog it up? So they throw it in a waste paper basket which I assume they have the cleaning lady empty on a regular basis.

But maybe it helps with global warming somehow. It has to have some benefit, it seems to me.

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We went out into the countryside yesterday and drove over a bit the rain had clean washed away. They’d trucked in a bunch of dirt and thrown it down to re-establish the road for the time being, but it was too squishy still for one dump truck. It got stuck; blocked a lane; and so we had to take turns.

I saw one of the road crew there present–presumably to direct traffic as each side took its turn–throwing rocks into the squishier parts of the road. Why not–one had to think–add toilet paper to firm it up and lock it into place?

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Some of the congregation seem to be trying to bring me back in as an option for the pastorate on some kind of technicality. We had the sort of congregational meeting largely characterized by feelings of amazed frustration and picking at the nit of the technicality. I am glad to say it did not work–sad illusion anyway. I wish it had not been characterized as it was in the realm of feelings.

They think the problem is that the leadership somehow, that the pastor from the other church who is overseeing things for us has handled things badly and screwed the chances up. He has in the sense that he put me in there at all to begin with. Bad, silly move. But not in the sense of being uncooperative, of somehow scaring me off, or anything of the kind. In fact, it all helps to close the door most firmly to this silly idea entertained by many that somehow I am something other than a third-rate Science Fiction writer.

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Not that there’s a chance of me staying. I’m done with the third world and I’d like to be back in time to vote Obama’s third-world administration out of office. The possibility of the pastoral office has passed over me. I have given my best effort to living other people’s dreams, and done it with a good conscience as to my effort. All the congregation was pleased and many still want to vote me in. (These crazy Latinos also like Obama, if that gives you anything to judge by.) There is something in the law about double jeopardy, and I am sticking to my guns. No sir, no way, nohow.

I’m working, individually, on getting people to quit calling me pastor. I just got invited to join some kind of Spanish Gospel Coalition blog thing and I wrote back to tell them that I’m not a pastor. Maybe they’ll want me for their blog effort anyway. I’ll have to tell them I’m an aspiring Science Fiction writer, or else, what that I will probably soon be the employee of a temp agency, again.

And then we’ll see how much of the culture of celebrity is clogging their toilet.